Horror
by digby
I don’t know who did this but whoever it was, they are going to hell:
I guess if what you want to do is turn America into an authoritarian nightmare this is one good way to do it.
Update: I don’t know how useful this is, but Google has released a tool to find loved ones and friends. Since cell phones have been shut down maybe this will be helpful.
“This is what illegal abortion looks like”
by digby
I’m going to let Katha Pollit speak for me on this Kermit Gosnell matter:
Blood-spattered floors. Cat feces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anesthesia. Two women dead, countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor. This was the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. This is what illegal abortion looks like.
She wrote that in January of 2011, by the way.
This nonsense about there being some pro-abortion media conspiracy to black-out this trial is idiotic, to say the least. It has all he hallmarks of a right wing hissy fit designed to make this macabre psycho the face of Planned Parenthood. But the fact of the matter is that women’s rights advocates like me were horrified and disgusted by this horrible crime and spend huge amounts of energy trying to ensure that it never happens. As Pollit said in her piece:
It might seem odd that Pennsylvania, where antichoice legislators have laden abortion with restrictions, should have been so uninterested in the Women’s Medical Society. But actually it makes perfect sense. As Carol Tracy put it, “The problem here was that Pennsylvania has always focused on eliminating abortion, not on abortion as healthcare.” In fact, as she points out, the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, the primary vehicle for regulating abortion, is part of the criminal code. “Since abortion isn’t seen as medical care, they didn’t have the appropriate locus for oversight.”
What fueled Gosnell’s business were the very restrictions the legislature was so keen on passing—parental notification, waiting periods, biased counseling and, most important, a ban on state funding for abortion for low-income women. Would women have gone to the Women’s Medical Society if Pennsylvania paid for abortion with Medicaid funds? Would they have had late procedures if they could have afforded earlier ones? Maybe some underage girls went to him to avoid the parental notification rules that supposedly protected them. Only women who felt they had no better alternative would have accepted such dangerous, degrading and frightening treatment. In a way, that’s the saddest part—that women didn’t feel they could turn around and leave.
And make no mistake, if the anti-abortion zealots have their way there will be many more clinics just like this one. Abortion will always be with us, it’s up to us whether they will be performed at fetid and brutal criminal enterprises or safe and legal health care clinics.
Sarah Posner has written an excellent piece dissecting the entire story and putting it all in perspective. Highly recommended.
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Taxes for me but not for thee
by digby
As many of you finalize your taxes today, think on this:
Because they’ve been creating so many jobs. Oh wait …
Here’s a guest post from Americans for Tax Fairness:
Wanna stop the cuts? Let’s talk corporations
by Frank Clement, Campaign Manager, Americans for Tax Fairness
While there is good reason for progressives to fight like hell to protect cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other vital programs following the release of President Obama’s budget, we always seem to find ourselves on defense. It’s time to go on offense to protect vital services and benefits and to promote a more just economy by making sure that big corporations and the richest 2 percent pay their fair share in taxes.
For the past two weeks, Americans for Tax Fairness – a coalition representing more than 280 national and state groups co-chaired by the Center for American Progress, AFSCME and National People’s Action – has been stepping up pressure on Congress to raise $ 1 trillion, in part by closing corporate tax loopholes. We’ve been exposing a “Corporate Tax Dodger of the Day” leading into April 15 — the always stressful “Tax Day.”
It’s not always the preferred topic — raising taxes — but let’s face it: millions of working families pay more in taxes some years, or pay a much higher income tax rate, than some of the biggest and most profitable corporations in America pay. Think ExxonMobil, General Electric, FedEx, Verizon, Wells Fargo and more. That’s wrong and I know I’m talking to folks who agree.
Today our coalition released a report that highlights a top ten list of companies screwing over the rest of us.
So where do we go from here? Let’s start with the release of President Obama’s budget. There were a lot of good things in Obama’s budget about taxes. He would raise more than $600 billion over the next 10 years from the richest 3 percent, mainly by limiting their tax deductions to the same rate as middle-class Americans. And he would close nearly $350 billion in corporate tax loopholes that go to companies that shift profits and jobs overseas, subsidize polluters, and coddle Wall Street.
Unfortunately, the President did not propose to use the savings from closing those corporate tax loopholes to protect Social Security or to reduce the deficit. Instead he has proposed that the money saved be plowed right back to corporations by lowering their income tax rate and by providing other subsidies. That’s unfair. And it’s just plain misguided.
Average Americans believe in fairness. Everything we care about — healthcare, education, roads, public safety — depends on a shared investment and everyone paying their fair share of taxes. That’s why our campaign isn’t just working inside the beltway, we’re in communities and neighborhoods across the country.
Let me be blunt: We need your help. Now is the time for us to mobilize to make sure corporations pay up. On Tax Day our coalition will mobilize events in over two dozen states under the brand “WHO PAYS” that show how tax breaks for the rich and loopholes for corporations increase burdens on our families. Details of the events are online but even if there is not something happening near you, please join us and keep involved in this fight as it builds over the next few weeks.
There you have it. Happy tax day everyone.
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Fatuous argument ‘o the day: destroying SS in order to save it edition
by digby
There’s an interesting Politico piece this morning examining Barack Obama’s record as a class warrior. (I know, I had a good laugh as well.) I’m going to delve into more later today, but I wanted to just highlight this quote from David Axelrod, which reflects one of the main lines of argument coming from the White House as to why we need to do all this right now:
Among Democrats there is division over whether Obama is squandering his victory by embracing in his new budget the idea that popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed to make them more affordable. Many liberals believe that this stance represents a surrender, in politics and substance alike, in what is their side’s most potent class-conflict weapon.
But to Obama loyalists, Democrats must act now to preserve their hallowed New Deal and Great Society accomplishments so they’re not emasculated later under a Republican president.
“The most persuasive case for reforming Medicare is saving Medicare,” said Obama strategist David Axelrod. “You don’t want to see the Big Bad Wolf making those decisions.”
To quote my friend DebCoop:
Axelrod “You don’t want to see the Big Bad Wolf making those decisions.”
This argument has the same rhetorical cadence and validity as this…
We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleeza Rice
And it’s just as eye-rollingly absurd. The idea that these cuts will permanently “take it off the table” is completely ridiculous. And I don’t think they believe it either. They can’t. They just aren’t that dumb.
What will happen is that in a year or two when the projections show that the Chained-CPI didn’t “solve the problem” and Social Security will still need to be shored up temporarily 25 years from now, the Democrats will go back to some of the other “helpful” proposals they’ve floated in the last couple of years such as means testing and raising the retirement age. To “save” the system, don’t you know. (I can guarantee that now that they’ve shot their wad on temporary tax hikes on millionaires for deficit reduction, there’s little to no chanced they’ll come back for another bite at that apple for a good long time.) So yeah, we’ll be “saving” it over and over again until there’s nothing left to save.
Sadly, as David outlines in the post below, the cult of personality surrounding this presidency means there is every likelihood that they will get away with it, at least this time. The White House endorsement is apparently all it takes to make the degradation of the New Deal programs acceptable to a whole lot of Democrats.
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From the “Headlines that Make You Want to Slit Your Wrists” Department
by David Atkins
Obama Called Their Bluff: Republicans Admit They Are Too Scared to Cut Social Security
No so-called Democrat should be able to write those words without drowning in unintended self-parodic irony.
Once again, offering to cut Social Security doesn’t make any politician on either side of the aisle look reasonable. It makes them look heartless, ignorant and foolish. There are no prizes given out for a politician who offers to cut Social Security, dares the other guy to take him up on it, and wins the dare. Well, maybe David Brooks and Tom Friedman will give out points–albeit reluctantly–but those guys don’t have a real constituency outside the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Daring the other guy to take you up on cutting Social Security makes you the “adult in the room” about as much as daring your friend to beat you in a game of Russian Roulette.
Anyone who think this little episode actually makes Democrats or the President look good has lost their mind. Anyone who thinks that this little episode will somehow hurt the Republican Party is deluding themselves. Republicans never intended to take the blame for cutting Social Security. They always intended to blame the President. And now they get to brag to their base that they stopped the President from cutting aid to seniors so that he could fund Obamaphones and “free stuff for those people.”
And since Social Security cuts were never on the table until the President put them there, it’s not like Social Security itself is in a better position than it was before. The Social Security cuts were the Republican demand in exchange for lifting the sequester. As of last report, the sequester still stands–which means that Republicans were basically holding sequester victims hostage to see if Democrats would be stupid enough to offer Social Security cuts. Meanwhile, if Republicans ever get back in total control of government, they won’t cut Social Security. It would take a centrist Democrat to offer something that stupid. They’ll just privatize it and say they expanded and strengthened it.
The world has gone mad. It’s not the first time.
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We just can’t afford a future
by digby
If this is a problem, why isn’t it fixed?
Let me say that when I’m talking to you here right now, my position on climate change was very moderate and actually very mainstream. And that is this: If you think that the science on climate change is settled, you’re simply overstating the facts. And let me give you an example of that. Two years ago, President Obama controlled the House and the Senate—the Senate by a 60-vote margin. They did not put forth a vote on human climate change. And do you know why? Why do you suppose they didn’t? Because they recognized that science behind this…
Well, that’s not true, actually but considering that they were dealing with an economic catastrophe solutions for which the Republicans were determined to obstruct, it’s amazing they even got that done. But you have to love the logic that says “the Democrats didn’t fix it so it must not be real.”
But this one’s a real doozy:
There’s one final thought that’s really important in this, which is that even if you concede that climate change is real, even if you concede, there are no reasonable remedies that don’t absolutely bankrupt the West.
So let’s party! Our kids and grandkids are gonna die anyway, amirite?
The good news is that when we go down, we won’t be in debt so at least we’ll have that.
I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m quoting some GOP back bench moron. Who cares what he thinks, right? Well, unfortunately this guy happens to be chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Environment. Yep.
Another step toward peace, love and understanding
by digby
This strikes me as a very, very hopeful sign that we might make some progress on this issue:
In the pews of the First Baptist Church of Orlando, where thousands of evangelical Christians gather on Sundays to worship and sing, a change of heart is happening on the once toxic issue of immigration.
Two years ago, national evangelical leaders began to speak out in favor of legislation to give legal status to immigrants in the United States illegally. Now, as Congress is about to start a debate on overhauling the immigration system, conservative Christians, once inclined to take a hard line on immigrants they viewed as lawbreakers, are consulting their Bibles and coming around to the pastors’ view.
“I feel I would be representative of a typical longtime Baptist, one who grew up in the Baptist Church, who was raised in an evangelical family, and I would identify myself as a conservative Republican,” said Jay Crenshaw, 36, a lawyer in Orlando who attended a service at the megachurch last Sunday. “And I can tell you how much my views have changed.”
For Mr. Crenshaw, as for many evangelicals, the rethinking came as a result of personal encounters with immigrants in church who were trying to navigate the maze of the nation’s immigration laws — in his case, a Colombian friend who turned out to be here illegally.
“It seems something’s broken about the system,” Mr. Crenshaw said.
The shift among evangelical Christians could have a powerful effect on the fight in Washington, as Republican lawmakers, including many who have opposed any amnesty for illegal immigrants, look to see how much they can support measures to bring those immigrants into the legal system without alienating conservative voters.
Evangelical leaders, seeing the opportunity to expand their influence on a social issue beyond abortion and same-sex marriage, have broadly united this year behind a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. They are conducting an ambitious push to sway Congress, including ad campaigns on Christian radio stations in five states, meetings with lawmakers and a challenge to churchgoers to pray every day for 40 days using Bible passages that speak of welcoming the stranger.
This group is as important to the Republican Party as African Americans are to the Democrats. They have huge influence regardless of how much to elites want to soft peddle it at time when it’s inconvenient. If they’re becoming more tolerant of their Latino brothers and sisters it bodes very well for some possible progress on immigration.
And the best part is that this is a hearts and minds shift not a cynical ploy by a bunch of numbers crunching political professionals. These folks really are more tolerant and it’s because they are seeing the humanity of people they had only seen as abstraction before. And that’s a very good thing for our culture. It mirrors the changes across our culture (unfortunately not so much among the very religious) toward the LGBT community.
The optimistic way to look at this is that if people really do start to see each other’s basic humanity, we might find that they will seek solidarity in other ways as well. It’s a start.
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Criminalizing childhood
by digby
The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun.
Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.
“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”
Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.
The good news is that they very rarely even get a legal defense and end up going through huge hoops over what used to be understood as normal adolescent behavior requiring parental interventions or counselling, maybe detention or suspension. But I guess it’s never too early to turn our kids into criminals.
A study in contrasts
by digby
Obama’s new budget, released today, makes this clear. Although the White House doesn’t advertise this fact in the six-page budget overview it put out this morning, the new budget eliminates nearly all of the cuts that sequestration imposes on the Pentagon. Instead of $500 billion in cuts, Obama proposes only $100 billion, and you have to look closely to spot it (“$200 billion in additional discretionary savings, with equal amounts from defense and nondefense programs”).
Along with the well-advertised cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits, this is something that should appeal to the GOP. “It’s another one of the peace offerings in Obama’s package to Republicans,” Robert Litan, the director of research for Bloomberg Government and a former official of the Office of Management and Budget, told me.
Other discretionary cuts to domestic programs:
Discretionary spending bore the brunt of the sequester cuts and the president kept most of those intact in his own budget. Let’s trace a few line items over the next decade to judge the president’s priorities.
The National Institutes of Health, which is the font of most of the basic and applied science that leads to medical innovation, would receive about a 2% a year increase over the next decade in its current $31 billion budget—barely enough to keep pace with inflation.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does even worse. It would grow from $5.5 billion this year to $6.1 billion in 2023—a cumulative increase of 11% or barely a percentage point increase each year on average. In other words, the president’s plan proposes to substantially cut inflation-adjusted spending on prevention, disease monitoring and public health—a foolish long-term strategy if ever there was one if the goal is to reduce healthcare spending in entitlement programs.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, which does everything from promoting primary care to funneling physicians to rural areas, fares only a little better in the budget. It will increase by 21.8%, or about 2% a year on average, to $6.7 billion—again barely keeping pace with inflation.
I get that the reversed of almost all of the defense cuts is a present for the Republicans (and hawkish Democrats.)But if the idea is to get the Democrats to vote for the Grand Bargain because the sequester is so destructive, you’d think they would have reversed those sequester cuts to domestic programs in their budget as well.
I guess the Democrats are supposed to vote for the sequester cuts and the “entitlement” cuts and be content that the Pentagon is completely funded. It’s an unusual strategy. I wonder if it will work?
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God help you if you’re out of work longer than 6 months
by digby
Your depressing story of the day:
There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional. That was the conclusion of recent research I highlighted a few months ago by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed, and William Dickens, a professor of economics at Northeastern University, that looked at Beveridge curves for different ages, industries, and education levels to see who the recovery is leaving behind.
Okay, so what is a Beveridge curve? Well, it just shows the relationship between job openings and unemployment. There should be a pretty stable relationship between the two, assuming the labor market isn’t broken. The more openings there are, the less unemployment there should be. If that isn’t true, if the Beveridge curve “shifts up” as more openings don’t translate into less unemployment, then it might be a sign of “structural” unemployment. That is, the unemployed just might not have the right skills. Now, what Ghayad and Dickens found is that the Beveridge curves look normal across all ages, industries, and education levels, as long as you haven’t been out of work for more than six months. But the curves shift up for everybody if you’ve been unemployed longer than six months. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, a blue-collar or white-collar worker, or a high school or college grad; all that matters is how long you’ve been out of work.
I don’t know if the government can fix this problem, but I’m thinking that it could least try talking about this and explaining that people are discriminating when they do it. I suspect that this has taken hold for many in the business world as some sort of proxy for the “lazy-moochers-takers-who want-something-for-nothings” that the right wingers see as the unemployed. They figure that if someone’s been unemployed for longer than a few months it must be because they love living on all those luxurious bennies they are getting for free. Otherwise, they’d have found a job, right?
But that can’t be true for everyone. There must be some decent people who just haven’t thought this through and are using it as a quick filter without considering the real life consequences. I’d imagine that anyone with an open job gets a lot of resumes and has to figure out ways to weed them. This may just be something that’s entered the conventional wisdom and nobody’s questioned it. Someone needs to wake them up.
And, if we lived in a rational world where the government did it’s job for the people instead of serving the wealthy, it would do this:
It’s time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed. The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.
They are obsessed with possible projected deficits 20 years from now. This, not so much. I wonder why?
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